Written in Red
by OnYourLeft107
Summary: "Our story is written in red. But at least we lived to write it." "We wrote it from fragments of memory, things no one should have to remember. Beautiful things, too. We wrote it all down." WinterWidow fic, no smut. Told from the perspectives of Natasha and Bucky.
1. Routine

_"Our story is written in red. But at least we lived to write it."_

 _"We wrote it from fragments of memory, things no one should have to remember. Beautiful things, too. We wrote it all down."_

* * *

The sky was red that day, outside the studio window. _...Red sky at morning, sailors' warning…_ the childhood rhyme returned to me as I dressed, a quiet uneasiness rippling my calm. _But I'm not a sailor…._ I tied the ribbons of my pointe shoes into starched bows. They were black, unlike the other girls' pale pink. I had a leotard to match; plain, soft, sewn for practicality and not frills. No tutu. I wove my usually unruly hair into a tight bun, the fly aways pinned back into submission.

They watched my routine. The spins, bends, leaps, easy lands, movements smooth and with perfect balance, flexible stunts and displays. As I finished, there was silence. They were still watching. They were always watching. But today, someone was watching with them. A man I had never seen before.

They motioned for me to relax my ending pose, and as I did, I saw that the other girls had left. I was alone in this grey room, a room that would soon turn Red. The uneasy feeling returned, creeping up my spine to my neck and through my scalp. A suspicion crept over me, one that said I had worked too hard, done too well at my little game of survival. A suspicion that said I was being promoted to terminate others' chances at it. A suspicion that wasn't wrong.

He looked at me, the man I had never seen before. He was dressed in black, too. Appropriately. This place was filled with that color, the color of death. His eyes were a cold, striking blue, lips drawn into a line. Not an angry one. Not a stern one, either. It was a line of earnest observation and masked interest. Rare.

My eyes traveled down to his hands. One bare, one gloved. Interesting. Maybe he had a prosthetic limb or a deformed hand. He looked as though he had found himself in several circumstances that could have afforded him the injury.

His waist held a belt with several holsters for guns, sheaths for knives, pockets for grenades, and other fatal tools. Boots too. I guessed he must have at least a few weapons tucked in them, probably a few more up his sleeves.

I looked back at his face. Jaw set, eyes apparently taking inventory of me, too.

I wondered why he was there, why his glance never left mine as the empty compliments began to flow from my audience of murderers by profession. I didn't have to wait long to find out.


	2. Fire

She was just a girl when I first saw her. In years, only a couple my junior, but her mind was still young and fresh.

Bright hair, even brighter eyes.

There was a fire about her, in her glance, in her temperament, in the way she flowed through the dance. She was faster, more efficient than all of them, like a flame that couldn't be quenched. Even later, after they broke her, the spark was still there, waiting impatiently for a little breath to blow it into a coal, then a blazing inferno again.

She was fierce and proud and beautiful. Quick witted, easy to teach, harder to make obey. Something about her demanded respect, and even those who hated, mistreated, and manipulated her held her in higher esteem than most. She was a lovely poison. A spider whose web was an easy snare. She was alluring. Underneath she was good, but her persona did not match her heart. It was most likely true that she didn't want it to be that way, but none of us did. None of us who still had something of us left.

She was strong and fragile, sweet and bitter, all at the same time. Something told me she cared but she'd never let it show. That's why the first time I told her I loved her, a long time later, I didn't expect her to say it back.


	3. Ice

I noticed how young he was when they introduced us. How young and yet how old. "This is your trainer," they told me, but I saw something more. I had a closer look when they set us up to spar. My pointe shoes came off, so did his jacket. And we squared up, eyes still locked. He was taller, more muscular than me. Chilling eyes, a chilling arm to match. I was right, it wasn't flesh. But I didn't expect it to be pure metal.

He was cold, but not in the way everyone else was. The man behind that icy stare, the one I would come, in time, to know and love, was only frosted over, not frozen away. Not yet.

He was powerful, but not terribly overpowering. Humble, but defiant all the same. I could tell he was a fighter, a man who had fought all his life. A man who had never stopped fighting, a man who never would stop.

He didn't like using his hands. Not the _hand_. He never smiled. I would see it growing on his face, lightening his eyes, waiting to burst out, and he would pull it back, shut it down.

I was terrified. But not of him. I had the sense he wouldn't hurt me of his own desire, not like the others had. Although he was certainly capable of it. Instead, I was afraid of what they may order him to do, what they might tell me to accomplish. I had reason to be wary. He wasn't my first trainer and he wouldn't be my last.

We were both lost, and somehow that helpless feeling let us trust each other. After a long time.

He was brilliant. A dull brilliance that went unnoticed. Because it wasn't what they molded him into that was worthwhile, it was the stuff he was made of. It was who he was before coming here, who he would be after he was free. They hadn't snuffed out the real man completely, and that was their downfall. They never were able to take his old spirit out, not really. His disguise simply muffled it for a while. I saw through.

On our first day, he seemed captivated by me, almost as much as I was by him. I watched him closely, afraid to trust him too much for comfort. He did the same.

When he floored me a few seconds after they told us to begin, I knew he was a challenge worth undertaking.


	4. Natalia

I helped her up, we sparred some more. My handlers gave me disapproving glances as I offered her a hand and I heard whispers erupt after we started swinging again. I didn't care. She was the first person I hadn't been ordered to hurt for as long as I could think back to. There were people I was gentle with before her, I felt it rather than knew it. But I didn't believe it, not with my stained hands.

Eventually, they left us alone with a guard at the door.

Natalia. She said that was her name. I never could make it sound as graceful as she did when it simply fell out of her mouth. Her lips quivered with a smile the first time I struggled to say it. It wasn't as if _Natalia_ was a hard word to pronounce, but at that time I wasn't used to saying anything at all.

Her voice was so different from mine; silky with an edge, graceful in her accent. She asked where I was from, said I didn't sound like anyone she had met. I told her I couldn't remember where I was born or where I grew up. She didn't believe me, but she didn't ask again.

With downward eyes she shook her head and told me if I had a homeplace I wanted to forget, I could simply say so. She'd understand.

I didn't know how to tell her that the only thing I wanted to do was remember.


	5. James

Everything in our world was black and gray. Everything but the star on his arm that matched my hair: red. It was a welcome change at first, the red, before one by one, every person and thing we came in contact with left soaked in the color, if they left at all. Only our handlers were exempt.

He didn't know his name. That struck me as odd. It wasn't that he was playing dumb or that for some mysterious purpose he refused to tell me. The man genuinely didn't know. He couldn't tell me his real name, but I couldn't call him "The Winter Soldier," either. He was more than that. So I called him друг, friend. Until I finally snuck into his file after everyone was asleep and learned his real name.

I cried that night, because I had read about everything they had taken away from him. HYDRA had stolen so much more than a name. They had torn away his whole life. And made him into a ghost from his nightmares.

I wanted to help him remember, but it risked too much. He could lose the few fragments he still had, I could lose my life. So I kept quiet, stayed as kind as I could.

And I called him James.


	6. Hope

I didn't want to make her into a trained killer. I didn't want to show her how to creep into a populated place and leave it empty of living beings. Or how to slit throats, snap necks, crush skulls. I didn't want to train her to take lives.

But I didn't have a choice.

Neither did she, if she wanted to avoid a long and painful death.

We wanted to escape together. Free ourselves from that conscious nightmare. We had plans to. We were close a few times; we almost pulled it off. But before we were able to one of us had new orders, or she she was pulled away for special training, or I needed work done on my arm or my brain.

They never fully wiped me in those days, only fragments at a time. And only when it was necessary. Which made my mind more frustrating than anything else. I could only think of faces without names or associations, names without people or history attached, memories with only shadows for characters. I had random puzzle pieces and no completed picture. No knowledge of how they fit together, no way of learning how. Despite this, I knew one thing. No matter what had happened in the past, this was not what I wanted my future to be. I had to escape.

We left once, slipped off for a day, thought naively we might actually have a chance. The feeling that came over me then scared me. I hadn't felt it in so long. I didn't know what to do with it.

I think it was hope.

Her eyes sparkled that night was we laid low in a motel room; she was sitting on the bed, I was sitting up against the wall by the door. Neither of us had said anything since we arrived there, only sat, wondering how long this blissful freedom could last.

We couldn't sleep as the snow drifted and swirled outside the window, a streetlight flickering some ways off. At every slight creak or thump our bodies tensed, hands clutched our guns. But for those few hours, we were free.

That's when I told her. Mumbled it under my breath. "I love you."

I felt her eyes immediately upon me. She stood and walked over, sat across from me on the dull brown carpet, took my face in her hands. "I love you, too," she whispered.

Her lips were almost on mine when they burst in, dragged her off of me, kicked her to the floor. I'll never forget the expression in her eyes before they tazed her. One of heartbreak, one of fear. And one of a young girl's hope struck down so far she could never fully get it back.


	7. Ghost

I didn't see James for a long time after that.

There were interrogations and screaming and bruises and cuts; reprimands, hard training, threats, and lockdowns; constant surveillance, tears, and clenched fists. I had forgotten what it was like before I was his student, his partner. Didn't take much to be reminded. The training was no longer quiet, gentle, easy to understand. He had somehow made even the most violent of maneuvers not seem so bad, so...destructive.

Those days were hell. Worse than anything they did to me was this: they wouldn't let me speak to or even see him. Everyone around me was forbidden to mention his name; I was punished when I brought him up. I didn't know if he was alive or what they had done or were doing to him.

And then, one day, he was there. Standing in the door or my training facility.

My first reaction was one of joy and relief that he was back, that he was still alive. My second was of overwhelming dread as he choked the breath from my lungs.

I searched his eyes, clear and sharp as they were, not clouded and confused as I expected them to be. But he didn't see mine or hear my cry for help.

 _You could at least recognize me._


	8. Puppet

I was never the same after the night at the motel. They brought me back and I was introduced to The Chair in all its sickening glory. That was the first time I was fully wiped, my brain a blank slate. They gave me my kill switch then, the one initiated by ten sequential words.

 _Longing._

The desire I was never free from. Everything lost, everything forgotten, everything taken away - I wanted it all back. But I didn't even know where it came from or where to start.

 _Rusted._

The description of something old, something that had weathered the storm, something with a history, with meaning. I just didn't know mine.

 _Seventeen._

The age of fearlessness. The year I was born. The amount of bullets I had fired into my last victim.

 _Daybreak._

The color red, but beautifully portrayed. Not the color of violence or fear or the color of tongues that have been silenced or eyes that have been stung with tears. Morning brings light and joy and hope and renewal. Everything I once knew. Now I dreaded waking up.

 _Furnace_.

A container for something not meant to be contained. Something hot, something dangerous, something essential. Something red.

 _Nine_.

The number of letters I sent home during the war that never reached the waiting hands. The friend of _nein_ , the word of rejection. The word I never ceased to hear.

 _Benign._

My mother's face. The way the man from my past treated anything or anyone hurt. The eyes of a child locked on mine before she took her last breath.

 _Homecoming._

The word I waited to hear, pulled myself through for, stayed alive in hope of. The event that never happened.

 _One._

How to define a single thing. Someone alone. Someone abandoned. Someone no one could reach.

 _Freight Car._

The last clear memory I had. The sound of a train churning down the tracks, of the same man's scream, of falling.

And now, the sound of nothing. Because every thought that had previously run through my mind, I couldn't remember. I couldn't go back, not even to three seconds before. I was The Winter Soldier now, nothing more.

They didn't know how much torture those words would cause me later, how they would make me a liability not worth the risk. Even if they had known, they wouldn't care.

I was their puppet. She was their ragdoll. And however much they enjoyed playing with us, they knew someday we'd break. What did it matter? We were expendable.


	9. Little Girl

After James and I were caught and everything was restarted, I lost any dream I had of escaping HYDRA's grasp.

They did something to James. He wasn't...human. At least, I didn't think so at the time. Not when the first thing he tried to do was suffocate me. After all this time of silently worrying over him, my heart hurt more than my throat.

The two of us were more closely watched than ever before and our communication was limited under all circumstances. They couldn't stop me from seeing, though, how he had changed. How I had changed. How we had changed. Nothing could be the same now that our relationship had been cut off as it began to bloom.

I was tired. Tired of the pain. Tired of pretending it didn't exist. Tired of holding everything in, forcing myself to be someone I wasn't, something I didn't want to be. Tired of the struggle. Tired of not having a choice. Russian roulette would have been my favorite game, had they not confiscated my weapons after every mission.

And he watched me whenever he could.

I still didn't know if he knew it was _me_ , but I could sense that he felt the need to protect me anyways, even if he didn't know why. Those days were some of the hardest in my life, even harder than when we were separated, because he was barely out of my grasp. I couldn't reach out far enough. I didn't have the courage.

It was in that turmoil that the memories I had tried so hard to push away came softly back, slipping into my mind at random times and refusing, quietly, to leave.

Memories of my mother, sweet and gentle, stroking my hair, braiding it before bed.

Memories of my father, reserved but loving all the same. I remembered the brush of his scratchy beard when I wrapped my arms around his neck and planted a kiss on his cheek. The way I always felt safe in his arms.

Memories of my younger brother, dark haired and small, so small when they were all taken away.

Shot, killed, gone.

Again and again, I wrestled with the questions that haunted my every day: Why?

Why was I spared? What did they see in me? After all, when they found me I was alone near the ruins of our burning house, tears making runs through the ashes clouding my face. What could they have expected? I was just a little girl.


	10. Ripped Away

The wiping was becoming more and more frequent, and every time I lost the memories I fought harder and harder to get them back. As soon as Natalia's training was finished, they took her away for her final "ceremony." When I saw her again, I knew something was incredibly wrong.

She didn't smile any more, not a real smile, not even to encourage me. She was silent and still, even when they questioned her, even when they screamed for answers until my ears rung and I backed away. There was a vacancy in her eyes as if some part of her had been taken away.

And as I learned later, it had.

They took away from her one of the greatest gifts women had ever been given. Her ability to carry a child. And that broke her more than anything else.

"To prevent complications," was their excuse, but what they had done to her was inexcusable. They took the strongest, most beautiful woman I had ever laid eyes on and treated her like an object to be broken. And she did break. The amount of pain she was feeling was so great that she became numb, lifeless. She no longer had the same compassion, she no longer reacted to torture or threats. She was no longer Natalia.

And I couldn't help her.

As if to rip away any chance at our deriving comfort from each other, they began sending us on missions alone. We had our backup team nearby sometimes, but we were without each other. Eventually, after repeated memory restarts, I couldn't recall what it felt like before. Who I had known. Who we had been. But I knew that she was inside of this shell of a person I no longer recognized. She was still there, whoever she was.

This only made my resolve stronger. I had to remember. I didn't know why but something told me that if I could remember who I was before I had even met her, who she had been, I might understand why everything felt so...wrong. Why what these people said didn't ring true in my heart and why I felt I should fight them. I couldn't understand my own determination, but it was _mine_. It wasn't something they had put there. And that was enough to tell me that it was right. So I held onto it. It's what kept me from complete insanity.

And it's what sent me in and out of cryofreeze for the next fifty years.


	11. Shattered

The procedure.

The words still make my heart freeze. At the time, it killed my emotion for a significant stretch. I couldn't dare to feel because the ache was too deep, too real.

"Silly girl," the nurses had teased as the anesthetic wore off and I found myself awake, in terrible pain, and weeping. "Silly girl. What could you have possibly hoped for? A normal life? A quiet marriage? A _baby_ of all things?"

One laughed as I continued to sob, the other scoffed. "You really thought you could manage a child, have a child trust you after everything you've done?"

I was ashamed, but I couldn't stop the tears, a natural reaction to shattered dreams.

"And what man would want a woman whose hands are forever stained red?" They shook their heads, smiles filled with fake pity, checked that the straps holding me down were secure, and left me in the blank white room.

Maybe it was foolish to hope, hold on to the fantasy of loving and being loved by a good man, having a life built on mutual respect and care, having a baby, maybe a few. I admired my parents' home, one filled with love and discipline. And I guess, unbeknownst to my consciousness, I hadn't purged the deep-seated hope that maybe one day, that could be me.

Until now. When I knew it never would be.

 _Maybe we could still escape from this prison._ I attempted to console myself. But with James scheduled for cryofreeze, it was nearly impossible. I squinted my eyes shut and tried to end my display of weakness. The picture I saw was blurry and sad. If we ever did escape, and saw our reflections, we would never recognize ourselves.


	12. Uncovered

Living for years in and out of a suspended state does things to you. Things that aren't pretty.

On one hand, I'm glad for those years, because lives were saved and I was spared from taking them. On the other, those years were some of the hardest, most confusing, and frustrating times in my life.

It's hard to describe being in a coma-like state, and I guess it's different for everyone. For me, it was a mixture of a complete awareness that I was alive, and a gnawing doubt that said I was actually dead. It was similar to a late-night insomniac silence, one where my mind was dulled but still going two hundred miles an hour. Questions and reasoning in my subconscious made themselves evident, paired with pieces of memory that I would receive at different times. A story at one point, a name at another, the faces and scene sometime else. My mind churned and churned, cross-examining itself constantly, swimming with questions, slowly, as memories returned, finding answers.

In reality, it must've gone on at a sluggish rate, though it felt fast and panicked. Once in awhile I'd wonder how long it'd been, but I had no concept of time other than everything was dark and painfully slow. Then there were moments of pure emptiness, where even my toddling thoughts stopped and I simply existed. The comatose version of sleep.

I had to wonder if my life was real, if time was real, if my memories were real. They were all so scattered; it took so long to piece things together again. When I did, I found three different men, different variations of the same soul.

One was a clean-cut gentleman. Or he wanted to be. A boy from Brooklyn, an older brother, friend, a flirt. He had three siblings, parents, a scrawny best friend he liked to dig up trouble with. This man was young, the little guy he was friends with called him Bucky. He had a yearning for life, to find the right girl, marry, raise a family, do it right. His own family served as inspiration, as did his best friend. I never did remember the kid's name until later, and that frustrated me beyond belief. Steve. Never could connect the name to the face until I was taken out of the tank, though. Right before it was wiped away again.

The second man I remembered being was a reserved variation on the first. A soldier in a war, fighting hard, hoping to return home and live a normal life. Worried, perpetually, about his buddies. This man was more reckless himself than he'd want people back home to believe, but he was disciplined; he didn't want to come home in a casket. At one point, this man was captured and experimented on. It changed him, made him lose hope for a stretch. But the little guy - who was somehow big now, it was still confusing - rescued him.

And then he fell. Down, down, down, screaming, losing sight of his best friend. A violent landing. Blood. Searing pain in his left arm. Waking up in the lab again. Z...Zola? Zola hovering above him, cackling.

That was the birth of the third man.

"The Winter Soldier" they called him, and they called him that so long he forgot his real name. They were terrible, the things they made him do, the things they did to him. Unrepeatable things. This was the man I desperately didn't want to remember, the man I desperately didn't want to be.

But somewhere inside me I knew I had been all these men, that all these men were me. I came to accept that. I wondered if this limbo was some kind of punishment for the last one.

I wanted to live again. Start new.

Every time they woke me up, every time a warm breath of air filled my lungs and I opened my eyes to new faces, the familiar ones aged, I knew two things. One, I had somehow stayed the same while everyone else changed. And two, they had woken me up for a sole purpose. To scratch someone off a list. Which meant all the information I had dug up and clarified was about to be buried in a scrambled mess.

My eyes always searched for Natalia, but I never saw her anymore. It didn't matter much; her memory faded as soon as I was wiped.

I fought back as much as I could, as much as I remembered how. But once they had me in the Chair, there was nothing I could do.


	13. Frost

They made me watch. They made me watch that first time he was put in the chamber, secured, frozen slowly into a suspended state. I don't know what they hoped to accomplish, if they hoped to accomplish anything. Maybe they just wanted to watch my face draw in pain, my eyes look away as he screamed my name, the only thing he could think of, the only thing he could remember after the most recent wipe. Whatever their purpose, I was done playing games. The little girl they had taken advantage of was gone.

A lost woman took her place, a woman with one resolve: I would never let anyone control me again. As soon as I was able, I left. I had wanted to take James with me, but I couldn't safely lead him out. It broke my heart, but I accepted the bitter truth of escaping alone. Someday, when I could actually help, I would come back.

I always intended to come back.


	14. Mistake

It was an endless cycle of frustration. Remembering, forgetting, killing, going back under. Until, finally, they woke me up for something new. An assassination, yes, but this person was more important than the others. He was a close friend of my handler, Pierce. Too close. He was too close to the truth. He had become more of a threat than he was worth.

But this wasn't a stealth mission. This wasn't a creep through the dark, stay low profile, leave no traces job. They were sending me out in broad daylight, with only a mask to shield my identity, on a busy street in the middle of a city, to explode things. To fire a gun. To leave destruction and ruins behind me.

To make a statement.

HYDRA was coming out of the shadows. And it was very much alive. It was to bring controlled misery to all those in its path. It was to be a new age, ruled not by the people, but by the ideals of a few elite.

Sending me out as their announcement...that's where it all went wrong.


	15. One Name

_Breathe._

 _Breathe._

I was trying my best. To stay calm, to keep cool, to switch my assassin mode on and feel nothing, care for no one.

It wasn't working.

Hardly ever did. At least, not anymore. Back in the day, I had pulled it off. Until I returned from a mission to kill someone who resembled my father. Who had a family, who I killed on his way home to them. I fell apart. It had never hit me in the past that I had killed a real person until I returned that day and heard those cursed words that were repeated at the end of every mission:

"Молодец, солдат." - "Well done, soldier."

I looked down at my hands to find a father's blood stained them. A father whose children would never see him again.

Then it hit me. Hard.

I was a murderer. And I could never take what I had done back.

Going numb never worked for very long after that. It certainly wasn't working now.

This time, it wasn't because I had killed someone. Those days of targeted assassinations were long past. I had been sent on a strike mission to retrieve information. I didn't even know the extent of what was on the flashdrive I picked up. But I had seen one name during the upload. Джеймс Бьюкенен Барнс. James Buchanan Barnes.

And that was enough.

It was enough to spark thousands of images, memories, emotions, desires. Colors I hadn't seen vibrantly for so long that I had forgotten they existed. Thoughts I hadn't dared to think in years. Pain so sharp I wondered how it had dulled with time. Terrible, terrible guilt, because I had never gone back for him, though I had longed to. And the terrifying realization that had threatened my fragile world for so long.

He might still be alive.


	16. Shielded

"You failed," they told me, after I returned, and they weren't words I was used to hearing. It made me want to smile, knowing my target was still alive, but I soon regretted it. HYDRA didn't accept failure, and they certainly didn't want their assassins feeling any sort of joy.

They sent me after him again. I crept through the quiet neighborhood streets, avoiding civilian glances, keeping my eyes focused straight ahead, my mind concentrated on one thing alone: the target.

I found Fury in a regular building. I watched. I waited. There was an agent disguised as a nurse in the apartment over who could draw attention to the scene. I couldn't act carelessly. Then a man entered, talked to her, and broke into his own apartment where the target was hiding. Clearly he was trained enough to realize he wasn't alone, and he stood, talking to the fugitive.

I readied my gun and waited for the signal. It was supposed to be a stealth mission, but with civilians complicating the circumstances it was turning into a hit and run. I was signaled to shoot through the wall. I knew I had hit Fury in several places, that he would most likely bleed out before he could be treated. So I ran.

I looked to my left as I sped across the roof and saw the same man who had broken into the apartment chasing me. And he was catching up. Something wasn't normal about him, but I didn't want to shoot; one death was enough for one night. I hoped he'd keep his distance.

Next thing I knew, some giant metal disk he was carrying was coming straight for my head. So I caught it. The quiver that the metal sent up my arm upon contact was strange. The colors, the shape felt almost familiar. Like it was something I had held before. The man that threw it I didn't recognize, though. Hadn't fought him before and his eyes and face were too hard and angry to match people in any lingering pieces of memory I had. I dismissed the passing thought and feeling I couldn't identify and tossed the disk back.

I didn't need to kill him. After all, I'd probably never see him again.


	17. Heartstop

_Don't do this. Don't do this to me, Fury. Not you. Not again._

I didn't try to hide how upset I was this time. Emotion was one thing I had gradually let back in to a certain extent over the years. But the more I let it in, the less control I had. I didn't like that. It made me feel soft, fragile. More than I already was underneath the confidence I projected. But Steve was the only one around, and in that moment, I didn't care if he thought I was weak. It was like losing my parents all over again.

Fury had become more like a father to me than a superior. He had saved me, pulled me back together from the scattered mess I was, and offered me a new life. A chance. Something I accepted, but didn't deserve.

Now, that same man was bloodied and dying on an operation table. The one person I could easily rely on and wholeheartedly trust was being taken away from me. I wasn't ready to let go. But I was more than ready to take out whoever had shot him. Didn't matter to me who he was or what his motives were, as soon as I found his assassin I was prepared to snap back into everything Fury had trained me out of, and show no mercy. I took a sharp breath in and forced myself to ask the question.

"Tell me about the shooter."

Steve stared straight ahead, head lowered, hands clenched on the railing. "He was fast. Strong. Had a metal arm."

And all of a sudden, I wanted to throw up. I could barely keep myself from shaking as my former resolution crumbled. I knew it was him. Everything around me faded to a blur except one machine. As the peaks on the monitor went to a line, I could have sworn it was my heart, not Fury's, that had stopped.


	18. Mission

"He's dead. Well done, солдат." Rumlow flipped through a clipboard of papers and I kept my eyes on him, something in his tone making me uneasy. He watched me with malign eyes and a white lie smile. "You can't go back to sleep just yet."

Something about the way he looked and the words he said sent an anxiety bubbling through the foggy stillness of my mind. I swallowed, waiting for the reason I knew he would communicate, hoping that it wasn't the Chair. I had been gradually gaining back my own thoughts. I didn't want to let them go yet.

"You have a new target. A threat to our security and a threat to the world."

I sighed. _That seems to be the running trend lately._

"He's a traitor to HYDRA. Agent Sitwell. He let some of our intel get into the wrong hands. He's not a field agent, should be easy to pick off. He will be accompanied by three highly trained operatives. They're not your targets, do not engage except if necessary. Shoot to kill."

I stayed silent, slowly pushing the stream of protests out of my mind. I hated the ice, but I hated killing more. I knew there was no way around it, and Rumlow was waiting for an answer.

I inclined my head slightly and he handed me the clipboard with a picture of the man I was supposed to take out. I handed it back and stood to get my weapons.

I didn't know I had just accepted the assignment that would change my life.


End file.
